The end of official color-blindness and the rise of anti-anti-racism in Latin America

ABSTRACT

The last two decades witnessed the demise of official color-blindness across most of Latin America. This shift is clearly evident in national censuses. A few decades ago almost no Latin American countries included questions about race or ethnicity on national censuses. Today, the systematic collection of such data is the dominant practice in the region. The end of official color-blindness is also increasingly evident in the adoption of targeted social policies in many countries. 

Most analysts of this shift have focused on the politics of recognition that pressured states to make afro-descendent and indigenous populations officially visible in statistics and social policy. In this talk, I draw attention to a different reading of this trend. I show how the politics of recognition that has demanded and achieved the official visibility of race and ethnicity in Latin America is also, simultaneously, a politics of erasure. It is a politics that has relied upon the invisibilization of some lines of delineation as a necessary and often deliberate counterpart to the official recognition of others. I argue that analyzing the politics of erasure as a constitutive part of the politics of recognition is critical to explain emergent forms of reaction against anti-racist politics in the region.